Somewhere in Red Gap Part 12

They didn't know how rich at first, of course, but Angus got a.s.says and they looked so good they must be a mistake, so they sunk a shaft and drifted in a tunnel, and the a.s.says got better, and people with money was pretty soon taking notice.

"One day Snowstorm come grouching down to Angus and tells about a capitalist that had brought two experts with him and nosed over the workings for three days. Snowstorm was awful dejected. He had hated the capitalist right off. 'He wears a gold watch chain and silk underclothes like one of these fly city dames,' says Snowstorm, who was a knowing old scoundrel, 'and he says his syndicate on the reports of these two thieving experts will pay twelve hundred for it and not a cent more.

What do you think of that for nerve?'

"'Is that all?' says Angus, working away at his job in the new International Hotel at Wallace. Graining a door in the dining-room he was, with a ham rind and a stocking over one thumb nail, doing little curlicues in the brown wet paint to make it look like what the wood was at first before it was painted at all. 'Well,' he says, 'I suspected from the a.s.says that we might get a bit more, but if he had experts with him you better let him have it for twelve hundred. After all, twelve hundred dollars is a good bit of money.'

"'Twelve hundred thousand,' says Snowstorm, still grouchy.

"'Oh,' says Angus. 'In that case don't let him have it. If the shark offers that it'll be worth more. I'll go into the mining business myself as soon as I've done this door and the wainscoting and give them their varnish.'

"He did so. He had the International finished in three more days, turned down a job in the new bank building cold, and went into the mining business just like he'd do anything else--slow and sure, yet impetuous here and there. It wasn't a hard proposition, the stuff being there nearly from the gra.s.s roots, and the money soon come a-plenty. Snowstorm not only got things trimmed up but had 'em dyed black as a crow's wing and retired to a life of sinful ease in Spokane, eating bacon and beans and cocoanut custard pie three times a day till the doctors found out what a lot of expensive things he had the matter with him.

"Angus not only kept on the job but branched out into other mines that he bought up, and pretty soon he quit counting his money. You know what that would mean to most of his race. It fazed him a mite at first. He tried faithfully to act like a crazy fool with his money, experimenting with revelry and champagne for breakfast, and buying up the Sans Soosy dance hall every Sat.u.r.day night for his friends and admirers. But he wasn't gaited to go on that track long. Even Ellabelle wasn't worried the least bit, and in fact she thought something of the kind was due his position. And she was busy herself buying the things that are champagne to a woman, only they're kept on the outside. That was when Angus told her if she was going in for diamonds at all to get enough so she could appear to be wasteful and contemptuous of them. Two thousand she give for one little diamond circlet to pin her napkin up on her chest with.

It was her own idea.

"Then Angus for a time complicated his amateur debauchery with fast horses. He got him a pair of matched pacing stallions that would go anywhere, he said. And he frequently put them there when he had the main chandelier lighted. In driving them over a watering-trough one night an accident of some sort happened. Angus didn't come to till after his leg was set and the st.i.tches in--eight in one place, six in another, and so on; I wonder why they're always so careful to count the st.i.tches in a person that way--and he wished to know if his new side-bar buggy was safe and they told him it wasn't, and he wanted to know where his team was, but n.o.body knew that for three days, so he says to the doctors and Ellabelle: 'Hereafter I suspect I shall take only soft drinks like beer and sherry. Champagne has a bonnier look but it's too enterprising. I might get into trouble some time.' And he's done so to this day. Oh, I've seen him take a sip or two of champagne to some one's health, or as much Scotch whiskey in a tumbler of water as you could dribble from a medium-boilered fountain pen. But that's a high riot with him. He'll eat one of these corned peaches in brandy, and mebbe take a cream pitcher of beer on his oatmeal of a morning when his stomach don't feel just right, but he's never been a willing performer since that experiment in hurdling.

"When he could walk again him and Ellabelle moved to the International Hotel, where she wouldn't have to cook or split kindling and could make a brutal display of diamonds at every meal, and we went down to see them. That was when Angus give Lysander John the scarfpin he'd sent clear to New York for--a big gold bull's head with ruby eyes and in its mouth a nugget of platinum set with three diamonds. Of course Lysander John never dast wear it except when Angus was going to see it.

"Then along comes Angus, Junior, though poor Ellabelle thinks for several days that he's Elwin. We'd gone down so I could be with her.

"'Elwin is the name I have chosen for my son,' says she to Angus the third day.

"'Not so,' says Angus, slumping down his one eyebrow clear across in a firm manner. 'You're too late. My son is already named. I named him Angus the night before he was born.'

"'How could you do that when you didn't know the s.e.x?' demands Ellabelle with a frightened air of triumph.

"'I did it, didn't I?' says Angus. 'Then why ask how I could?' And he curved the eyebrow up one side and down the other in a fighting way.

"Ellabelle had been wedded wife of Angus long enough to know when the Scotch curse was on him. 'Very well,' she says, though turning her face to the wall. Angus straightened the eyebrow. 'Like we might have two now, one of each kind,' says he quite soft, 'you'd name your daughter as you liked, with perhaps no more than a bit of a suggestion from me, to be taken or not by you, unless we'd contend amiably about it for a length of time till we had it settled right as it should be. But a son--my son--why, look at the chest on him already, projecting outward like a clock shelf--and you would name him--but no matter! I was forehanded, thank G.o.d.' Oh, you saw plainly that in case a girl ever come along Ellabelle would have the privilege of naming it anything in the world she wanted to that Angus thought suitable.

"So that was settled reasonably, and Angus went on showing what to do with your mine instead of selling it to a shark, and the baby fatted up, being stall-fed, and Ellabelle got out into the world again, with more money than ever to spend, but fewer things to buy, because in Wallace she couldn't think of any more. Trust her, though! First the International Hotel wasn't good enough. Angus said they'd have a mansion, the biggest in Wallace, only without slippery hardwood floors, because he felt brittle after his accident. Ellabelle says Wallace itself ain't big enough for the mansion that ought to be a home to his only son. She was learning how to get to Angus without seeming to. He thought there might be something in that, still he didn't like to trust the child away from him, and he had to stick there for a while.

"So Ellabelle's health broke down. Yes, sir, she got to be a total wreck. Of course the fool doctor in Wallace couldn't find it out. She tried him and he told her she was strong as a horse and ought to be doing a tub of was.h.i.+ng that very minute. Which was no way to talk to the wife of a rich mining man, so he lost quite a piece of money by it.

Ellabelle then went to Spokane and consulted a specialist. That's the difference. You only see a doctor, but a specialist you consult. This one confirmed her fears about herself in a very gentlemanly way and reaped his reward on the spot. Ellabelle's came after she had convinced Angus that even if she did have such a good appet.i.te it wasn't a normal one, but it was, in fact, one of her worst symptoms and threatened her with a complete nervous breakdown. After about a year of this, when Angus had horned his way into a few more mines--he said he might as well have a bunch of them since he couldn't be there on the spot anyway--they went to New York City. Angus had never been there except to pa.s.s from a Clyde liner to Jersey City, and they do say that when he heard the rates, exclusive of board, at the one Ellabelle had picked out from reading the papers, he timidly asked her if they hadn't ought to go to the other hotel. She told him there wasn't any other--not for them. She told him further it was part of her mission to broaden his horizon, and she firmly meant to do it if G.o.d would only vouchsafe her a remnant of her once magnificent vitality.

"She didn't have to work so hard either. Angus begun to get a broader horizon in just a few days, corrupting every waiter he came in contact with, and there was a report round the hotel the summer I was there that a hat-boy had actually tried to reason with him, thinking he was a foreigner making mistakes with his money by giving up a dollar bill every time for having his hat s.n.a.t.c.hed from him. As a matter of fact, Angus can't believe to this day that dollar bills are money. He feels apologetic when he gives 'em away. All the same I never believed that report about the hat-boy till someone explained to me that he wasn't allowed to keep his loot, not only having clothes made special without pockets but being searched to the hide every night like them poor unfortunate Zulus that toil in the diamond mines of Africa. Of course I could see then that this boy had become merely enraged like a wild-cat at having a dollar crowded onto him for some one else every time a head waiter grovelled Angus out of the restaurant.

"The novelty of that life wore off after about a year, even with side trips to resorts where the prices were sufficiently outrageous to charm Ellabelle. She'd begun right off to broaden her own horizon. After only one week in New York she put her diamond napkin pincher to doing other work, and after six months she dressed about as well as them prominent society ladies that drift round the corridors of this hotel waiting for parties that never seem on time, and looking none too austere while they wait.

"So Ellabelle, having in the meantime taken up art and literature and gone to lectures where the professor would show sights and scenes in foreign lands with his magic lantern, begun to feel the call of the Old World. She'd got far beyond 'Lucile'--though 'Peck's Bad Boy' was still the favourite of Angus when he got time for any serious reading--- and was coming to loathe the crudities of our so-called American civilization. So she said. She begun to let out to Angus that they wasn't doing right by the little one, bringing him up in a hole like New York City where he'd catch the American accent--though G.o.d knows where she ever noticed that danger there!--and it was only fair to the child to get him to England or Paris or some such place where he could have decent advantages. I gather that Angus let out a holler at first so that Ellabelle had to consult another specialist and have little Angus consult one, too. They both said: 'Certainly, don't delay another day if you value the child's life or your own,' and of course Angus had to give in. I reckon that was the last real fight he ever put up till the time I'm going to tell you about.

"They went to England and bought a castle that had never known the profane touch of a plumber, having been built in the time of the first earl or something, and after that they had to get another castle in France, account of little Angus having a weak throat that Ellabelle got another gentlemanly specialist to find out about him; and so it went, with Ellabelle hovering on the very edge of a nervous breakdown, and taking up art and literature at different spots where fas.h.i.+on gathered, going to Italy and India's coral strand to study the dead past, and so forth, and learning to address her inferiors in a refined and hostile manner, with little Angus having a maid and a governess and something new the matter with him every time Ellabelle felt the need of a change.

"At first Angus used to make two trips back every year, then he cut them down to one, and at last he'd only come every two or three years, having his hirelings come to him instead. He'd branched out a lot, even at that distance, getting into copper and such, and being president of banks and trusts here and there and equitable cooperative companies and all such things that help to keep the lower cla.s.ses trimmed proper. For a whole lot of years I didn't see either of 'em. I sort of lost track of the outfit, except as I'd see the name of Angus heading a new board of directors after the reorganization, or renting the north half of Scotland for the sage-hen and coyote shooting, or whatever the game is there. Of course it took genius to do this with Angus, and I've never denied that Ellabelle has it. I bet there wasn't a day in all them years that Angus didn't believe himself to be a stubborn, domineering brute, riding roughshod over the poor little wreck of a woman. If he didn't it wasn't for want of his wife accusing him of it in so many words--and perhaps a few more.

"I guess she got to feeling so sure of herself she let her work coa.r.s.en up. Anyway, when little Angus come to be eighteen his pa shocked her one day by saying he must go back home to some good college. 'You mean England,' says Ellabelle, they being at the time on some other foreign domains.

"'I do not,' says Angus, 'nor Sweden nor j.a.pan nor East Africa. I mean the United States.' 'You're jesting,' says she. 'You wrong me cruelly,'

says Angus. 'The lad's eighteen and threatening to be a foreigner.

Should he stay here longer it would set in his blood.' 'Remember his weak throat,' says Ellabelle. 'I did,' says Angus. 'To save you trouble I sent for a specialist to look him over. He says the lad has never a flaw in his throat. We'll go soon.'

"Of course it was dirty work on the part of Angus, getting to the specialist first, but she saw she had to take it. She knew it was like the time they agreed on his name--she could see the Scotch blood leaping in his veins. So she gave in with never a mutter that Angus could hear.

That's part of the genius of Ellabelle, knowing when she can and when she positively cannot, and making no foolish struggle in the latter event.

"Back they come to New York and young Angus went to the swellest college Ellabelle could learn about, and they had a town house and a country house and Ellabelle prepared to dazzle New York society, having met frayed ends of it in her years abroad. But she couldn't seem to put it over. Lots of male and female society foreigners that she'd met would come and put up with her and linger on in the most friendly manner, but Ellabelle never fools herself so very much. She knew she wasn't making the least dent in New York itself. She got uncomfortable there. I bet she had that feeling you get when you're riding your horse over soft ground and all at once he begins to bog down.

"Anyway, they come West after a year or so, where Angus had more drag and Ellabelle could feel more important. Not back to Wallace, of course.

Ellabelle had forgotten the name of that town, and also they come over a road that misses the thriving little town of North Platte by several hundred miles. And pretty soon they got into this darned swell little suburb out from San Francisco, through knowing one of the old families that had lived there man and boy for upward of four years. It's a town where I believe they won't let you get off the train unless you got a visitor's card and a valet.

"Here at last Ellabelle felt she might come into her own, for parties seemed to recognize her true worth at once. Some of them indeed she could buffalo right on the spot, for she hadn't lived in Europe and such places all them years for nothing. So, camping in a miserable rented shack that never cost a penny over seventy thousand dollars, with only thirty-eight rooms and no proper s.p.a.ce for the servants, they set to work building their present marble palace--there's inside and outside pictures of it in a magazine somewhere round here--bigger than the state insane asylum and very tasty and expensive, with hand-painted ceilings and pergolas and cafes and hot and cold water and everything.

"It was then I first see Ellabelle after all the years, and I want to tell you she was impressive. She looked like the descendant of a long line of ancestry or something and she spoke as good as any reciter you ever heard in a hall. Last time I had seen her she was still forgetting about the r's--she'd say: 'Oh, there-urr you ah!' thus showing she was at least half Iowa in breed--but nothing like that now. She could give the English cards and spades and beat them at their own game. Her face looked a little bit overma.s.saged and she was having trouble keeping her hips down, and wore a patent chin-squeezer nights, and her hair couldn't be trusted to itself long at a time; but she knew how to dress and she'd learned decency in the use of the diamond except when it was really proper to break out all over with 'em. You'd look at her twice in any show ring. Ain't women the wonders! Gazing at Ellabelle when she had everything on, you'd never dream that she'd come up from the vilest dregs only a few years before--helping cook for the harvest hands in Iowa, feeding Union Pacific pa.s.sengers at twenty-two a month, or splitting her own kindling at Wallace, Idaho, and dreaming about a new silk dress for next year, or mebbe the year after if things went well.

"Men ain't that way. Angus had took no care of his figure, which was now pouchy, his hair was gray, and he was either shedding or had been reached, and he had lines of care and food in his face, and took no pains whatever with his accent--or with what he said, for that matter. I never saw a man yet that could hide a disgraceful past like a woman can.

They don't seem to have any pride. Most of 'em act like they don't care a hoot whether people find it out on 'em or not.

"Angus was always reckless that way, adding to his wife's burden of anxiety. She'd got her own vile past well buried, but she never knew when his was going to stick its ugly head up out of its grave. He'd go along all right for a while like one of the best set had ought to--then Zooey! We was out to dinner at another millionaire's one night--in that town you're either a millionaire or drawing wages from one--and Angus talked along with his host for half an hour about the impossibility of getting a decent valet on this side of the water, Americans not knowing their place like the English do, till you'd have thought he was born to it, and then all at once he breaks out about the hardwood finish to the dining-room, and how the art of graining has perished and ought to be revived. 'And I wish I had a silver dollar,' he says, 'for every door like that one there that I've grained to resemble the natural wood so cunningly you'd never guess it--hardly.'

"At that his break didn't faze any one but Ellabelle. The host was an old train-robber who'd cut your throat for two bits--I'll bet he couldn't play an honest game of solitaire--and he let out himself right off that he had once worked in a livery stable and was proud of it; but poor Ellabelle, who'd been talking about the dear Countess of Comtessa or somebody, and the dukes and earls that was just one-two-three with her on the other side, she blushed up till it almost showed through the second coating. Angus was certainly poison ivy to her on occasion, and he'd refuse to listen to reason when she called him down about it. He'd do most of the things she asked him to about food and clothes and so forth--like the time he had the two gold teeth took out and replaced by real porcelain nature fakers--but he never could understand why he wasn't free to chat about the days when he earned what money he had.

"It was this time that I first saw little Angus since he had changed from a governess to a governor--or whatever they call the he-teacher of a millionaire's brat. He was home for the summer vacation. Naturally I'd been prejudiced against him not only by his mother's praise but by his father's steady coppering of the same. Judiciously comparing the two, I was led to expect a kind of cross between Little Lord Fauntleroy and the late Sitting Bull, with the vices of each and the virtues of neither.

Instead of which I found him a winsome whelp of six-foot or so with Scotch eyes and his mother's nose and chin and a good, big, straight mouth, and full of the most engaging bedevilments for one and all. He didn't seem to be any brighter in his studies than a brute of that age should be, and though there was something easy and grand in his manner that his pa and ma never had, he wasn't really any more foreign than what I be. Of course he spoke Eastern American instead of Western, but you forgive him that after a few minutes when you see how nice he naturally meant to be. I admit we took to each other from the start.

They often say I'm a good mixer, but it took no talent to get next to that boy. I woke up the first night thinking I knew what old silly would do her darndest to adopt him if ever his poor pa and ma was to get b.u.t.tered over the right of way in some railroad accident.

"And yet I didn't see Angus, Junior, one bit the way either of his parents saw him. Ellabelle seemed to look on him merely as a smart dresser and social know-it-all that would be a 98 cent credit to her in the position of society queen for which the good G.o.d had always intended her. And his father said he wasn't any good except to idle away his time and spend money, and would come to a bad end by manslaughter in a high-powered car; or in the alcoholic ward of some hospital; that he was, in fact, a mere h.e.l.ling scapegrace that would have been put in some good detention home years before if he hadn't been born to a father that was all kinds of a so-and-so old Scotch fool. There you get Angus, _fills_, from three different slants, and I ain't saying there wasn't justification for the other two besides mine. The boy could act in a crowd of tea-drinking women with a finish that made his father look like some one edging in to ask where they wanted the load of coal dumped. But also Angus, _peer_, was merely painting the lily, as they say, when he'd tell all the different kinds of Indian the boy was. That very summer before he went back to the educational centre where they teach such arts, he helped wreck a road house a few miles up the line till it looked like one of them pictures of what a Zeppelin does to a rare old English drug store in London. And a week later he lost a race with the Los Angeles flyer, account of not having as good a roadbed to run on as the train had, and having to take too short a turn with his new car.

"I remember we three was wondering where he could be that night the telephone rung from the place where kindly strangers had hauled him for first aid to the foolish. But it was the boy himself that was able to talk and tell his anxious parents to forget all about it. His father took the message and as soon as he got the sense of it he begun to get hopeful that the kid had broke at least one leg--thinking, he must have been, of the matched pacing stallions that once did himself such a good turn without meaning to. His disappointment was pitiful as he turned to us after learning that he had lit on his head but only sustained a few bruises and sprains and concussions, with the wall-paper sc.r.a.ped off here and there.

"'Struck on his head, the only part of him that seems invulnerable,'

says the fond father. 'What's that?' he yells, for the boy was talking again. He listened a minute, and it was right entertaining to watch his face work as the words come along. It registered all the evil that Scotland has suffered from her oppressors since they first thought up the name for it. Finally he begun to splutter back--it must have sounded fine at the other end--but he had to hang up, he was that emotional.

After he got his face human again he says to us:

"'Would either of you think now that you could guess at what might have been his dying speech? Would you guess it might be words of cheer to the bereaved mother that nursed him, or even a word of comfort to the idiot father that never touched whipleather to his back while he was still husky enough to get by with it? Well, you'd guess wild. He's but inflamed with indignation over the state of the road where he pa.s.sed out for some minutes. He says it's a disgrace to any civilized community, and he means to make trouble about it with the county supervisor, who must be a murderer at heart, and then he'll take it up to the supreme court and see if we can't have roads in this country as good as Napoleon the First made them build in France, so a gentleman can speed up a bit over five miles an hour without breaking every bone in his body, to say nothing of totally ruining a car costing forty-eight hundred dollars of his good money, with the ink on the check for it scarce dry. He was going on to say that he had the race for the crossing as good as won and had just waved mockingly at the engineer of the defeated train who was pretending to feel indifferent about it--but I hung up on him. My strength was waning. Was he here this minute I make no doubt I'd go to the mat with him, unequal as we are in prowess.' He dribbled off into vicious mutterings of what he'd say to the boy if he was to come to the door.

"Then dear Ellabelle pipes up: 'And doesn't the dear boy say who was with him in this prank?'

"Angus snorted horribly at the word 'prank,' just like he'd never had one single advantage of foreign travel. 'He does indeed--one of those Hammersmith twin louts was with him--the speckled devil with the lisp, I gather--and praise G.o.d his bones, at least, are broke in two places!'

"Ellabelle's eyes s.h.i.+ned up at this with real delight. 'How terrible!'

she says, not looking it. 'That's Gerald Hammersmith, son of Mrs. St.

John Hammersmith, leader of the most exclusive set here--oh, she's quite in the lead of everything that has cla.s.s! And after this we must know each other far, far better than we have in the past. She has never called up to this time. I must inquire after her poor boy directly to-morrow comes.' That is Ellabelle. Trust her not to overlook a single bet.

"Angus again snorted in a common way. 'St. John Hammersmith!' says he, steaming up, 'When he trammed ore for three-fifty a day and went to bed with his clothes on any night he'd the price of a quart of gin-and-beer mixed--liking to get his quick--his name was naked 'John' with never a Saint to it, which his widow tacked on a dozen years later. And speaking of names, Mrs. McDonald, I sorely regret you didn't name your own son after your first willful fancy. It was no good day for his father when you put my own name to him.'

"But Ellabelle paid no attention whatever to this rough stuff, being already engaged in courting the Hammersmith dame for the good of her social importance. I make no doubt before the maid finished rubbing in the complexion cream that night she had reduced this upstart to the ranks and stepped into her place as leader of the most exclusive social set between South San Francisco and old Henry Miller's ranch house at Gilroy. Anyway, she kept talking to herself about it, almost over the mangled remains of her own son, as you might say.

"A year later the new mansion was done, setting in the centre of sixty acres of well-manicured land as flat as a floor and naturally called Hillcrest. Angus asked me down for another visit. There had been grand doings to open the new house, and Ellabelle felt she was on the way to ruling things social with an iron hand if she was just careful and didn't overbet her cards. Angus, not being ashamed of his scandalous past, was really all that kept her nerves strung up. It seems he'd give her trouble while the painters and decorators was at work, hanging round 'em fascinated and telling 'em how he'd had to work ten hours a day in his time and how he could grain a door till it looked exactly like the natural wood, so they'd say it wasn't painted at all. And one day he become so inflamed with evil desire that Ellabelle, escorting a bunch of the real triple-platers through the mansion, found him with his coat off learning how to rub down a hardwood panel with oil and pumice stone.

Gee! Wouldn't I like to of been there! I suppose I got a lower nature as well as the rest of us.